Questions! Questions!

One of my all-time favourite characters in fiction is the lawyer Horace Rumpole – popularly known as Rumpole of the Bailey – and I’m sure some of you will remember the TV series in which Rumpole was portrayed so brilliantly by Leo McKern.

For
those of you unfamiliar with Rumpole let me give a bit of background. Horace
Rumpole is a character in a series of wonderful books by the writer and
barrister John Mortimer. Rumpole is also a barrister, working from his chambers
in Equity Court, and he likes nothing better than defending his clients in the
Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey. Indeed, his skill at defending his
clients – and he only ever defends, never prosecutes, is legendary among the
criminal classes. He is famed for his success in his greatest ever case, the
Penge Bungalow murders, and for his forensic knowledge of typewriters.

I
raise Rumpole this morning because he had a golden rule – one which the lawyer
in our gospel reading perhaps ought to have been more aware of. And his golden
rule was this. When in court, “Never ask a question of a witness unless you
already know the answer.”

Never
ask a question unless you already know the answer!

In
our reading this morning a lawyer asks a question of Jesus – a question to
which as a lawyer he already knew the answer. And as we hear, Jesus gives the
answer he is expecting.

But
then he makes the mistake of asking a supplementary question – to which he thinks
he knows the answer, but he gets an answer he isn’t expecting at all. As a
devout Jew and a lawyer – someone who would have known the law inside out – he
expects Jesus to say: Your neighbour is your fellow Jew. We know that,
because that’s what every law-abiding Jew at the time thought. But that’s not
what Jesus says – and Jesus in reply to his question gives us the now
well-known story of the Good Samaritan, and an answer that the lawyer is not
expecting at all.

The
story of the good Samaritan is at a basic level about generosity – but
generosity that goes far beyond that which normally people are prepared to
exercise. And it presents us with a huge challenge. Most of the time generosity
is relatively easy if not necessarily readily forthcoming: it only costs time
or effort or money and even then usually only as much as we feel we can afford
to give. It is when it costs us something really precious – life, reputation,
security – that which can never be repaid, that we really begin to get cold
feet.

Consider
the Good Samaritan. Would you have stopped to help? The Samaritan did. We all,
of course, know the point of this story – we’ve heard it times, and it’s
perhaps Jesus’ most well-known parable. And when we listen to this story we
have a tendency to say “Of course we would!”, but I suspect that the reality
for many people might be something different. To help someone who has been
attacked is to risk getting attacked yourself. Who knows whether the gang is
still around? Who knows whether the body is just a decoy? The road in the story
was one of the most dangerous roads around Jerusalem. It was notoriously
dangerous! And people were regularly attacked, robbed and killed. A common way
of luring travellers off the road was to use a body as a decoy. So people never
travelled alone, unlike the two main characters in our story.

And
the lawyer who asked the question of Jesus, and expected to get the stock
answer from Jesus that his neighbour was his fellow Jew, gets a shock. For
Jesus, in this story about generosity, says that the generosity came from a
Samaritan. And that’s hugely significant.

From
the Jewish point of view, that was the most unlikely place to find it. Jews and
Samaritans hated each other. Jews would never extend generosity to Samaritans.
Samaritans were descended from Jews had stayed on in Palestine after the Exile
centuries earlier – when Jews were carted off to Babylon. They had intermarried
with other local people and adapted their religion. So they were no longer seen
as pure Jews, and were despised by Jews because they were considered to have debased
their religion and their racial purity. How on earth could a Samaritan ever be
seen as your neighbour – nobody would expect you to love them.

And
yet it was a Samaritan who stopped to help. It was not the priest or the
Levite. They were not cruel or wicked men. The trouble was, they had their
religious duties to perform. To get mixed up with the injured traveller would
mean contamination, and very elaborate and inconvenient purification rites.

That
is why they passed by on the other side, and no doubt hoped that the traveller
was a corpse and therefore beyond any human help.

The
Samaritan, however, could not care less. He wasn’t worried about making himself
unclean. And it is this Samaritan, representing as far as the lawyer is
concerned an unclean, irreligious race, who does his duty to God and to his neighbour
– rather than two supposedly upright and religious people. The Samaritan is
more concerned with showing love to those in need, rather than the priest and
the Levite who were more concerned with religious procedure.

That
is meant as a lesson to dutiful religious people like the lawyer who asked
Jesus the question. No doubt a good man, someone who kept the Law but who lost
the point. And Jesus showed him something about the true nature of generosity,
and also that it could be exercised not just by those who kept the Law, but by
those whom Jews despised.

As
Christians we have no monopoly of generosity and goodness; many people of all
faiths and none show generosity and goodness to others. And we are not the only
ones who do God’s will. It is often the ones we think of as ‘outsiders’ who put
us insiders to shame. It is not the priest and Levite who are to be imitated,
but the Samaritan: “Go and do likewise” said Jesus.

But
the parable is not really just a lecture on how to behave. Jesus told the
parable as an illustration of the nature of God. The question arose because the
lawyer wanted to know what Jesus thought about what Jews called the “Shema” –
the proclamation of his duty to God and to his neighbour really meant – hence
his question, “Who is my neighbour?”

The
Samaritan did not expect anything in return for his generosity; he was generous
without any strings attached. When he took the risk with the traveller and got
involved, and when he came to the inn and left money with the landlord, he was
not casting his bread upon the water.

He
simply took the risk, helped someone who would have hated him, did his duty and
disappeared, leaving no forwarding address.

And
that, says Jesus, is what loving your neighbour means. Loving people and
showing that love in action – no matter who people are, or where they come from,
or what their lifestyle or background is – not simply loving those who
are like you!

And
Luke in recounting this parable is clear that the message of Jesus is that Christian
people must go and do likewise – Jesus is clear on that point.

Jesus
finishes by asking a question of the lawyer – a question that he already knows
the answer to, but he wants to know whether the lawyer does.

“Which of these three, do you think,” said
Jesus to the lawyer, “was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the
robber?” The lawyer cannot even bring himself to say the word “Samaritan”, and
just says, “The one who showed him mercy”. Jesus said to him, “Go and do
likewise.”

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We are the clergy of Saint John's Church in Caterham Valley in the UK. Saint John's is the parish church in Caterham Valley which is on the south side of Greater London just on the edge of the North Downs. Saint John's is part of the Church of England.

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